


Despair

by ThistleBrows



Category: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: Gen, implied suicide mention, tw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-30 18:41:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11469408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThistleBrows/pseuds/ThistleBrows
Summary: We all have those nights when we are visited by a specter of hopelessness. Henry Jekyll bottles his.





	Despair

November 15th, 1886

The walls do not close in around me but I cannot leave. I hide in my house every day and hate every moment inside. I struggle to stop myself from breaking down and falling apart but it’s that very feeling that pulls inside of me to pieces. I’m eating myself in circles like a snake eats its tail. I’ve got indigestion from how sick I feel from myself. I can’t stop eating because then the empty, hungry feeling will worsen, but every bite I take of myself hurts. I eat anyways. I want to pull my tail from my mouth, but I have no arms. It’s a cyclical self-destruction. Life lived in fear is unbearable and I cannot shake it. I only see one other way to stop living in fear.

I have become useless. An unproductive member of society. I used to have purpose, I used to help people. But I am consumed by my personal demons so much that I can no longer even help myself. There are moments where I reel in hopelessness and the rest of them feel like emptiness. I don’t know what to do with myself in those blank days but wait for the next episode of despair to wash me away. Each wave smooths my resistance til I have lost myself and become a blank stone, left amongst the others on the shore.

My fear controls me so much that I don’t notice. When confronted, my mind rationalizes avoiding a course of action. It is a mental block so great that I don’t realize that I am squeezed by a grip of fear. When I will myself to say something or do something, the fear pulls at me with such force that I cease moving entirely that I may focus on holding myself together lest it pull my threads and I unravel. When I think of those around me and in society, I feel such shame and self-loathing. Bravery isn’t a lack of fear, it’s doing in spite of fear, and so I am a coward of the utmost caliber. No amount of intellectual knowledge about the irrationality of my thoughts or the benefits of getting up can loosen this vise of terror.

I am truly locked in an endless, self-imposed purgatory. Would that I had the mental fortitude to force an optimistic, confident outlook to spur me to action. Yet the events of the last two years and the daily effort of maintaining a façade amongst those near me has worn down my resolve to a stub. My constitution was never so strong. As a boy, I was always fragile, perhaps already compromised without my knowing. I was always promised to greatness, an illustrious career, so there was always a height from which to fall and it only grew with time. I cannot see the ground, clouded as it is by expectations. Whether they are mine or society’s, I can no longer tell the difference, or perhaps never could.

One is told to aim high and reach for the sky, but up here the air is thinner. My vision blurs, my balance falters. My faculties are so occupied in the task of standing aloft that to leap would destroy me. This is the truest irony, for if I refuse to leap I will surely fall anyways. Falling or flying. Either would end the cycle. I know which I’d prefer to see, if only I could properly govern myself.

But instead, I drink.


End file.
